{"id":628,"date":"2012-09-10T10:48:18","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T10:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/?p=628"},"modified":"2013-03-19T18:34:03","modified_gmt":"2013-03-19T18:34:03","slug":"queer-frames-4-circumstance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/2012\/09\/10\/queer-frames-4-circumstance\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer Frames #4: Circumstance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; \u201cThis film is not about fucking.\u00a0 It is about human rights!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; \u201cFucking is a human right.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; \u201cPolitics aren\u2019t that romantic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>These are just a few of the stances voiced in a debate about Gus Van Sant\u2019s 2008 film <em>Milk <\/em>that occurs among four young characters in Maryam Keshavarz\u2019s latest film, <em>Circumstance<\/em>.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]<\/a>\u00a0 This scene points up how the institutions of film culture and the discourses around films condense questions of politics, sexuality and queerness.<\/p>\n<p>Here the film\u2019s two women leads Atafeh and Shireen have been brought by two male friends Joey and Hossein to a video store that hides behind a barbershop\u2019s storefront.\u00a0 The women are in a secret passionate affair, and their affections for each other may elude Joey and Hossein who often make advances on the women with varying degrees of success.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/files\/2012\/09\/circumstance-2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"circumstance 2\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/files\/2012\/09\/circumstance-2-1024x428.png\" width=\"720\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>While browsing through the store\u2019s extensive selections, Hossein suggests that together they produce a dubbed version of <em>Milk<\/em>, something not found in Iran even amongst this store\u2019s pirated DVDs. According to Hossein, the film\u2019s story of gay rights serves as a useful allegory \u2013 not concerning the fates of queers living in Iran but exposing the path to freedom for an entire modern generation of Iran.\u00a0 (There\u2019s even the suggestion that Iran\u2019s women are oppressed like gay men were in the 1970s.) As Joey and Atafeh tease him about his entrepreneurial and political idealism,\u00a0Hossein persistently argues for the film serving as an inspiring example of grassroots politics for the youth of Iran. The conversation\u2019s oscillation between earnest sincerity and obnoxious mocking deftly allows the film to differentiate the attitudes of each participant.<\/p>\n<p>The film <em>Milk<\/em> is not simply an excuse to havea conversation about politics.\u00a0 It is simultaneously a harbinger of a future politics, an anachronism of a now inaccessible mode of being political (later we discover an old photograph Atafeh\u2019s father in 1970s Berkeley), and a cipher for what is political right now in the secret relationship shared by the women.\u00a0 Similarly, the conversation\u2019s setting is as interestingly as the content of its back and forth. Here the clandestine video store serves as not just background of this heated discussion but also as the site that fuels the tensions among these youths, exposing how modern Iranian history impacts each of their lives in disparate ways.\u00a0 The mise-en-scene of the video store \u2014 and all the desires and sentiments that location generates \u2014 allows <em>Circumstance<\/em> to expose the political fault-lines of sex and gender.<\/p>\n<div>\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" \/>\n<div>\n<p><a title=\"\" href=\"#_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a> In a talk at the 2011 SCMS conference in Boston, Patricia White of Swarthmore College read <em>Circumstance<\/em> against the \u201cGay Girl in Damascus\u201d blog hoax.\u00a0 My thinking on this film is indebted to White\u2019s keen attention to how the cross-cultural appeal of diasporic Middle Eastern films appears in the popular criticism and this film\u2019s own promotion. Her analysis of this discursive terrain includes key research into the film\u2019s online marketing and social media campaigns in the US and Europe.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/files\/2012\/09\/circumstance-3.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-656\" title=\"circumstance 3\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/files\/2012\/09\/circumstance-3-1024x422.png\" width=\"720\" height=\"296\" srcset=\"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/files\/2012\/09\/circumstance-3-1024x422.png 1024w, https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/files\/2012\/09\/circumstance-3-600x247.png 600w, https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/files\/2012\/09\/circumstance-3.png 1438w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &#8211; \u201cThis film is not about fucking.\u00a0 It is about human rights!\u201d &#8211; \u201cFucking is a human right.\u201d &#8211;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":631,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[69],"tags":[42,92,28,72,93,60],"class_list":["post-628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-queer-frames-2","tag-home-movies-2","tag-human-rights","tag-lesbian-desire","tag-lgbt","tag-lgbt-rights","tag-queer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/files\/2012\/09\/We-knew-you-were-gay1.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2GTJq-a8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":658,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions\/658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/gqc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}